Anachronism as power

What follows is part of the “Durkheim and the Internet” project – a self-conscious attempt at drawing theories of wider relevance from recent sociolinguistic studies and evidence. The theories are designed to provide a generalizable heuristic for new research, a set of potentially productive “grounded” hypotheses to be deployed in a wide variety of domains of investigation.

One of the theories emerging from this project is a theory of power – not a general one (power per se) but a specific one, about one kind of institutional power. Two points of departure underlie the effort here.

In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber describes the fundamental stupidity of contemporary bureaucratization, observing the spread of what he calls “power without knowledge”: “where coercion and paperwork largely substituted for the need for understanding (…) subjects” (2015: 65). The contemporary power of bureaucrats often involves an assumption of total knowledge (articulated…